Simple Truth

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Rufus Harms is rotting in a Virginia military prison. As readers learn in the terse opening of The Simple Truth, he was convicted 25 years ago of the brutal killing of a young girl. Readers also learn that Rufus did not commit the crime; out of a haze of memories and with fragments of evidence, he has reconstructed the truth about the horrid event that ruined his life. He knows his discovery could cost him his life, so he breaks from prison after sending an appeal to the Supreme Court that details a massive conspiracy tied into the foundations of Washington.

The complex drama of Rufus Harms is only one of the interwoven threads in this massive, violent legal thriller that also draws from the vocabulary of hard-boiled crime fiction. Baldacci offers glimpses into the arcane politics of the high court, where Justice Elizabeth Knight wages war with the manipulative Chief Justice Harold Ramsay. And while Harms struggles to keep out of harm's way and the justices duke it out, Supreme Court law clerk Sara Evans toils with ex-cop John Fiske to discover the import of Harms's appeal (and, simultaneously, to uncover the murderer of Mike Fiske, John's law clerk-brother and the original holder of the appeal). Their interest in the document apparently draws the attention of the same deadly conspirators who manipulated Harms over two decades earlier. While the armed mayhem sometimes rises to the point of excess, Baldacci's novel continues to offer new surprises until the final pages. --Patrick O'Kelley


From Library Journal
Will Baldacci's most recent title be another Winner, like his recent New York Times best seller? Here, a man convicted of a murder he's convinced he committed suddenly realizes that he's been framed and launches an appeal that leads to more murder.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Who is killing Supreme Court law clerks? Michael Fiske is the first to drop, and police do what they do with every mystery: canvass work colleagues for clues. Clerk Sara Evans has one that she keeps to herself. She knows Fiske read something scandalous in an appeal that he filched before the justices could read it. She knows, too, that the appeal was from a Rufus Harms. The reader knows that Rufus is a lifer in an army stockade whose grievance about his murder conviction starts the action. The plot problem is to get Rufus moving. Baldacci engineers that by writing in an escape and pursuit by army officers who want Rufus and anyone who knows about his case dead. Meanwhile, Sara hooks up with the dead Fiske's brother John, an ex-cop who insinuates himself into the investigation. As Sara and John piece together Michael's interest in Rufus' appeal, it becomes obvious that everyone has to meet, sort things out, and empty a few clips of ammo. Baldacci scripts this necessity into three different scenes before revealing the cover-up that accounts for the high body count. The crime being covered up is stale beer compared to the Supreme Court setting, but as with a scenic drive, the destination of a Baldacci cliff-hanger is less important than the route taken. Baldacci's passengers, repeaters and new ones alike, will be clamoring to ride along. Gilbert Taylor


From Kirkus Reviews
A tiresome potboiler in which an appeal to the US Supreme Court sets off a killing spree that produces enough corpses for each justice to go one-on-one. Rufus Harms was put away for murdering a little girl, and for 25 years that was okay with him because he thought he was guilty. But now, by dint of bureaucratic snafu, he learns the real story. On that horrific night, he was druggedfor reasons of a sketchy natureby a group of wicked conspirators; ergo, he had no control over his behavior. Rufus is no mental giant, yet even he can see he may have an out. He contacts his lawyer, the reluctant Samuel Rider, and intimidates him into filing an appeal before the Supreme Court. One fateful morning, then, Michael Fiske, the brightest and best of the Supreme Court clerks, opens the Court's mail, spots the Rider-Harms document, and decides to steal it, hying himself off to the jailhouse to offer Rufus help. This very act tips off the suddenly wary conspirators, and, naturally, they kill Michael. Enter John, Michaels brother, a former cop, currently a somehow idealistic defense attorney, who vows to search out the perp, in turn making himself a suspect. And then, naturally, there's Sara, a superbrilliant, incredibly beautiful lawyer, whose faith in John is immediate and unshakable. Together, they sniff out clues, a process that takes them into the cloistered chambers of the highest court in the land, where, according to Baldacci (The Winner, 1997, etc.), the justices behave like ill-tempered childrenexcept for the lone woman on the Court who behaves and talks like a character out of a romance novel: ``Sara respected your brother,'' she tells John, ``but her heart lies elsewhere.'' In the final, bloody act, the villain is revealed and denounced amid a Hamletlike body count. Just another big, silly book about lawyers. (First printing of 500,000) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


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Lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci cuts everyone's grass -- Grisham's, Ludlum's even Patricia Cornwell's -- and more than gets away with it.Read all 7 "From The Critics" >


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